1. Field of the Invention
The field of the invention is data processing, or, more specifically, methods, apparatus, and products for reporting and processing computer operation failure alerts.
2. Description of Related Art
The development of the EDVAC computer system of 1948 is often cited as the beginning of the computer era. Since that time, computer systems have evolved into extremely complicated devices. Today's computers are much more sophisticated than early systems such as the EDVAC. Computer systems typically include a combination of hardware and software components, application programs, operating systems, processors, buses, memory, input/output devices, and so on. As advances in semiconductor processing and computer architecture push the performance of the computer higher and higher, more sophisticated computer software has evolved to take advantage of the higher performance of the hardware, resulting in computer systems today that are much more powerful than just a few years ago.
One of the areas of computer technology that has experienced advancement is the generation, reporting and processing of system alerts—becoming an important part of systems management solutions. Alert reporting agents, components of automated computing machinery, are instrumented to generate alerts so that end users are made aware of system malfunctions, even ones of a predictive nature. These alerts are usually surfaced through some entity such as systems management software or an intelligent hardware control point such as, for example, a Baseboard Management Controller or ‘BMC.’ These prior art agents are not aware of the existence of one another, even though they may report alerts to the same management system, and their alert reporting procedures are typically incompatible, resulting in many duplicate alerts being issued to the end user in varying alert notification formats. This can result in many service calls from customers seeking help with seemingly unrelated alert messages which, when traced, are triggered by the same event. This problem also complicates the systems management software stack because the software has to make sense of often redundant alerts that have different content and latency due to network constraints. In fact, for many varieties of system faults, the system management resources can find themselves faced with a veritable ‘storm’ of redundant error messages.